Picador

Zero K

Synopsis

Jeffrey Lockhart has been summoned to The Convergence: a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely, cryogenically controlled.

He is there to say goodbye to his stepmother, Artis, who has chosen to surrender her dying body; preserving it until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return her to a life of transcendent promise.

And his healthy father, Ross, might join her.Hypnotic and seductive, Zero K is a visionary novel about the legacies we leave, the nobility of death, and the ultimate worth of 'the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth.'

Both beautiful and profound, certainly DeLillo's best since Underworld, it forces us to confront the spectre of our own mortality, to ask deep questions of our motives in wishing to prolong our span on Earth. We finish the novel with a sudden recognition of the kindness of death, the balm of a bounded life

Observer

DeLillo is one of urban life's most perceptive chroniclers

Independent

DeLillo's 16th novel takes a sanguine and, as usual, perceptive look at life as it is now, beset by wars, terrorism and the catastrophic results of climate change, and balances them against the beauty and joy that can be involved in being human